2009 July 26 | dinner with Julie

Archive for July 26th, 2009

Cottage Cheese Pancakes with Red Huckleberry Jam, Pear & Chocolate Chunk Bread Pudding Muffins and Road Food

Hey, we’re back. Sorry for the radio silence – my laptop decided awhile ago to be wireless intolerant, and won’t pick up any signals, let alone connect – so I’ve been unplugged since we left Tofino on Friday. (I would have been really hooped had it been last year.) Oh, we have so much catching up to do.

As beautiful a place Tofino is, it’s nice to be home.

I don’t usually backtrack on this blog – it’s all real time – but I feel the need for a recap in order to cover the edibles of our last days there and wander-through the BC interior en route to Calgary. Looking back, we ate a lot. The red huckleberries, for example – they turned into a mighty fine jam. I’m not going to even touch on the subject of how easy jam is to make – wait, I just did – but seriously, you don’t need pectin, you don’t need a chemistry degree, you don’t even need as much sugar as you think you do. I made one batch straight-up and it was wonderfully runny – I soaked the last half of grainy baguette in the last egg and cup of milk and made French toast to eat before making the early-morning run for the ferry, then used the wee toasts like dip lovers use those little corn chip scoops to load as much sweet-tart ruby red jam as they would structurally tolerate. It was like scooping as much summer as I could fit into my mouth before leaving the beachy place and going home to the tax audit, overgrown garden and messy office.

You’d be proud of me for how I managed to use up almost everything perishable before we left. (If you ever go grocery shopping in Tofino, you’d be thrifty too. It’s actually a deal to eat out.) At the very back of the fridge sat a tub of cottage cheese. My Mom loves the idea of cottage cheese – her good friend eats a dish of it every day for lunch with fruit, and she is the type I aspire to be – but whenever she makes up her mind to take cottage cheese on, the two of them don’t get along. She manages to down a bowl of the stuff and the rest goes soupy and eventually gets tossed. Such was the case with this sad tub.

On the day after we arrived, my parents’ next door neighbours popped by, and brought with them an immense, maroon leather-bound copy of The Gourmet Cookbook circa 1956 that her mother had given her. Talk about summer reading – it sat on the coffee table and we all thumbed through it throughout the week, pointing out gaudy-coloured photos, aspics and recipes like Cold-Glazed Ox Tongue, Marinated Brains Paysanne and Pigs’ Feet in White Wine Jelly, and noted that there is an entire section titled Innards. I decided that if any recipe book were to include recipes using cottage cheese, this would be it. I was right. It had a lovely recipe for Cottage Cheese Pancakes Brittany that turned out 6 dense, cheesy pancakes, which we topped with runny huckleberry jam, which made them sort of reminiscent of cheesecake. If and when I make them again, I’ll add a teaspoon of baking powder to lighten them a little (I’ve added it to the recipe below, but didn’t have any there). The original recipe also called for a few grains of white pepper and to sieve the cottage cheese, which I didn’t bother with.

Cottage Cheese Pancakes Brittany

adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook by Judith Price, 1956 edition (eighth printing)

1 cup cottage cheese
3 large eggs
1/4 cup sugar
pinch salt
1/4 cup milk
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
2 Tbsp. canola oil or melted butter

In a large bowl, beat together the cottage cheese, eggs, sugar and salt; mix until smooth, then add the milk and stir until creamy. Add the flour and baking powder and stir just until blended; stir in the oil or melted butter.

Preheat a griddle or skillet over medium heat and brush with butter or oil or spray with nonstick spray. Drop batter (I used a small ladle) onto the pan and cook until bubbles begin to break the surface and the edges no longer appear wet – flip using a thin spatula and cook until golden on the other side as well. Serve immediately or keep warm in a 250F oven until they are all cooked. Makes 6 good-sized pancakes, or twice as many dollar pancakes.